Eighteenth-century British draftsmen abroad

Magazine Antiques, June, 2001 by Scott Wilcox

When Charles Rogers (1711-1784), a connoisseur and collector, published A Collection of Prints in Imitation of Drawings in 1778, he stated that "it must be unquestionably allowed that Drawing is the Fountain from which all the imitative Arts have issued." (1) Rogers was more interested in the drawings of the old masters than those of his contemporaries, but drawing played a fundamental role in the attempts of British artists of the eighteenth century to establish a national school of art and to take their rightful place alongside the old masters. Drawing was at the heart of an artist's training, central to his practice, and, as the status of the artist increased, it was valued increasingly as the purest expression of his genius.

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If drawings could provide unique access to the wellsprings of creative genius, they could also serve the more utilitarian purpose of documenting the expanding world of a rising maritime and colonial power. Artists were recruited to record the far-flung reaches of empire, and no entourage of a wealthy grand tourist, no commercial mission to a distant capital, and no scientific voyage of exploration was complete without its draftsman. While the documentary works they produced were seldom accorded the status of high art, they offered aesthetic pleasure as well as practical information. As the century progressed, the topographical draftsman evolved into the expressive landscape painter in watercolors.

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As an island people, the British have always been inveterate travelers. Thomas Rowlandson's Dutch Packet in a Rising Breeze (Pl. I) and John "Warwick" Smith's Bay Scene in Moonlight (Pl. VI) celebrate travel by sea. (2) For such a keen observer of all aspects of contemporary life as Rowlandson, ships and sailors as well as the bustling life and lowlife of ports and harbors were inexhaustible sources of subject matter. His shipboard view of a Dutch packet boat crossing the Channel conveys vividly both the exhilaration and the discomfort inherent in such a crossing. It was the result of a visit he made to Holland and Germany in 1791. John "Warwick" Smith was one of the key figures in the transformation of topographical drawing into watercolor painting. His moonlit scene attempts to capture in watercolor the type of atmospheric view that the French painter Claude Joseph Vernet (1714-1789) had made popular in oils.

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For most British travelers in the eighteenth century, travel meant the grand tour--an extended round of sightseeing on the Continent, usually with Rome as the ultimate destination, that was regarded as a necessary component in the complete education of a gentleman. As Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who never did make the trip himself, put it in 1776:

A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. The grand object of traveling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean .... All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean. (3)

Rowlandson's Place des Victoires, Paris (cover and Pl. IV) suggests the mixture of superiority and appreciation with which British visitors viewed the French capital, an important stopover on the way to Italy. Among Rowlandson's satiric targets are French Catholicism, evident in the procession of monks and the inclusion of Notre-Dame (Rowlandson, no topographer, has misplaced the cathedral immediately behind la place des Victoires), and monarchism, signaled by the man in the sedan chair gazing devoutly at the monument to Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). The fashionably dressed women (always an attraction for Rowlandson) suggest French sophistication, which the British both envied and, in its more extreme manifestations, ridiculed. One of three known versions of the composition, this is most likely the original watercolor exhibited by Rowlandson at the Society of Artists in 1783. The image was engraved and published in Britain shortly after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 curtailed travel in France. (4)

{PCO}For many grand tourists, the trip across the Alps provided a sublime prelude to the civilized pleasures of Italy. In 1776 John Robert Cozens crossed the Alps and traveled in Italy with the connoisseur, collector; and classical scholar Richard Payne Knight (1751-1824), an aficionado of sublimity in landscape, who later made significant contributions to the growing body of literature about aesthetics and landscape. (5) Cozens produced a set of drawings of the Alps for Knight. Although Near Chaivenna in the Grisons (Pl. V), his most dramatic and sublime expression of alpine scenery, was not one of them, Knight's preoccupation with sublime landscape may well be reflected in Cozens's composition, which exaggerates the scale of the mountains to enhance the awesome grandeur of the scene. (6)

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While some British artists, like Cozens, accompanied grand tourists, others went on their own to study the remains of classical antiquity and experience the fabled landscape of Italy. Richard Wilson traveled to Italy in 1750 to improve his skill as a portrait painter: But in response to the allure of the Italian landscape, he gave up portraiture and devoted himself to landscape painting. Although he was primarily a painter in oils, over the course of his stay in Italy (until 1756 or 1757), Wilson also developed into a draftsman of great subtlety and delicacy. One of the crowning achievements of his Italian sojourn is the series of finished landscape drawings for William Legge (1731-1801), second earl of Dartmouth. Lord Dartmouth, who made the grand tour in 1752 and 1753, acquired two views of Rome in oils from Wilson and sixty-eight drawings, of which the Temple of Minerva Medica, Rome (Pl. XIV) is one. (7) While Wilson's drawings for Dartmouth are topographical, depicting actual views in Rome and its environs, in his choice of black-and-white chalk on blue paper he quite consciously aligns himself with the traditions of old master drawing and distances himself from the topographical draftsmen with their precise pen-and-ink outlines and carefully calibrated watercolor washes.